Create schemas for B2B

Hi, I’m Margaret Tran, Senior Product Manager. Today I’ll be sharing with you more about the XDM business classes and field groups. In this video, we will discuss the data structure of XDM business classes and field groups, understand identity namespaces and the relationship between entities, and how to create namespaces, schemas, and set those relationships. Let’s first learn about the XDM business classes and field groups. Its development was driven by industry standards of important B2B entities and the common properties that all schemas would include. On top of the classes, we have field groups, which are a reusable component used to define one or more fields, which ultimately expands the schema by extending the class. To get a better understanding of how the classes and field groups are put together to make a schema, this table describes the recommended composition of business classes and field groups, along with a description to learn about each schema. Notice that some classes can have no additional field groups, just one or multiple. If you’re including custom attributes, you’ll include your custom field group to the related class. In addition, we leveraged the XDM experience event, also used for B2C scenarios, with field groups that are specific to Marketo standard activity types. This list will continue to expand to support the dozens of Marketo, Salesforce, and Dynamics standard activity types, but this shows what we support for now. Now, onto identity namespaces. Namespaces are created to differentiate between identities ingested from various sources and datasets. The creation of a namespace includes a name, identity symbol, and identity type. Customers have access to an automated script that can be executed through Postman. This script will generate all the required B2B namespaces and schemas for you to get started. This will be demonstrated in the video later on. As part of the B2B edition of Realtime Customer Data Platform, we are introducing a new account entity. Account records come through the Realtime Customer Data Platform from a number of different sources, so we’ll be leveraging the unified identity service to stitch these various account records together to build an account profile, similar to the individual profile. And to associate accounts to the familiar people entity, it’s important to know that people have a many-to-many relationship to accounts. These account IDs appear as an array on the profile. Another set of entities we’re introducing are marketing lists and campaigns. These are both important concepts in Marketo, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics, so it’s helpful to understand when to use which. Campaigns, otherwise known as programs in Marketo, are a list of leads or contacts used to manage marketing engagements and activities. On the other hand, we have marketing lists, also known as a static list in Marketo. These are a list of leads built by the end user. Between these many entities, we need to set up relationships within the schema. Relationships are used to define each identity within a schema and how they relate to other entities, such as people in accounts or accounts in opportunities. As you’ll see in the demo shortly, you will associate the identity field with its reference schema and its identity namespace, along with labels for these relationships. Now that you’ve received an intro, let’s see all of this in action. Let’s start out by looking in our list of new XVM business classes and field groups that have been provisioned for us. By navigating to the Schemas tab under Data Management on the left-hand side, you can first start out by searching for your classes. Enter in the term such as XVM Business, and you’ll be presented with the eight new classes that you can use to start building out your schema. Feel free to click into any of the classes to see the data structure and attributes within each class. Now going back to Schemas, if you also click onto the Field Groups tab, and again search for the term XVM Business, you’ll see a subset of the new field groups that you can use. Again, feel free to click into any of these field groups to see an example of the properties and fields within each field group. Others that didn’t appear in the list are either not B2B specific, such as XVM Experience Events, or the field groups related to those experience events, such as Visit Webpage, which you can freely search for, or Add to Opportunity. And again, feel free to click into any of these. These are just some of the standard Marketo activity types that are extended via field groups to work with the XVM Experience Event. Now if we navigate over to the menu item called Identities, we also have the addition of new identity namespaces which are used to differentiate between identities that get ingested from various sources. These will get used to stitch various identities together to a unified profile. For our B2B use case, we’re introducing a new set of B2B identity types, such as B2B Account or B2B Opportunity, for example. To help expedite the setup of both namespaces and schemas, we have provided an automated script that can be executed through Postman, which will generate all the required B2B namespaces and schemas to get you started with ingesting data. Let’s run through that now. For this demo, we will use the Marketo utility, but know that the setup for a CRM utility is very similar aside from the org ID. Through the documentation link, you’ll have access to the GitHub repository. There are two parts for setup. First is the environment setup, and you also have the auto-generation utility, both of which you’ll download and import into Postman. For the environment, although it’ll look empty initially, if you look at the documentation, we have sample values that will help you figure out what values to replace in the Postman utility. The end result will look something like this. This top section is composed of Adobe components, so you’ll find the values by following the Adobe developer console instructions, which will walk you through the steps to grab the access tokens, client IDs, and API keys necessary for the utility to run against your IMS orgs API. Next, we have the required Marketo munchkin ID, since this demo will create Marketo-specific namespaces and schemas. This behavior is similar if you’re using a CRM utility and require a CRM org ID. If you have a Marketo subscription synced to a CRM, the Marketo script is set to handle the secondary identities by entering the SFDC or MSC org ID here. Lastly, these two variables are pre-configured for features in Marketo, which are defaulted to false, but can be altered if you know you have these features enabled in Marketo. To get the utility to run, we leverage the Postman Runner. Click on your collection on the top-level folder called namespaces and schemas autogen utility. Click the Run section. That will take you to the Postman Runner. It’s useful to note that we’ll want to run all scripts in order and run the full progression rather than attempting to execute each individually, so you shouldn’t uncheck any of these boxes. Before we run the utility, we’ll go ahead and go to View and select Show Postman Console. This will be helpful to have up because the Postman Console will show any conflicts, errors, and detail. We simply want to verify that conflicts are acceptable and that we have no error. Now we can go ahead and run the utility. Back in Adobe Experience Platform, after your page is refreshed, you’ll now see the new namespaces that have been created. What you’ll see is a series of namespaces that follow a standard B2B naming convention, starting with the issuer, such as Marketo, then the entity type, such as static list, program member, or opportunity contact role, then the org ID. We can also take a look at some of the schemas that have been created. If we click into one of them, we can also see that the established relationships are already there, such as from opportunity to account. Note that these have the base setup of the schemas, so with each base class and field group that we recommend for our B2B use cases, they’re already there for you. You can optionally be modified or extended to include your custom attributes and field groups. Before we wrap up, I’d like to highlight that with the schema, we’ve also established relationships between entities. One critical new relationship that we’re introducing as part of our B2B use cases is between an individual and an account. People have a many-to-many relationship to accounts, meaning that you can have multiple individual profiles that can be related to multiple accounts. By setting up that relationship, those accounts will appear as values on the profile. We’re also introducing an entity called account-person-relation, and that defines the connection between individuals and accounts. And so although we’ve programmatically set up the relationships, I’ll demonstrate how the relationships can be established. First off, it’s defined within the schema, allowing each identity to be linked to its related entity. Within the schema builder, you’ll see this arrow that designates an identity. By clicking that, we’ll be presented with a new window to add the relationship. Let’s start from left to right. We first have the relationship type. It’s selected to be the default value of many-to-one. Then you’ll select the schema that you’re relating this identity to, and by doing so, you’ll have the reference identity namespace auto-populate. Then you’re going to select or set a friendly name or a label for the relationship name from both the current schema as well as the schema that you’re referencing. These are used as labels within profile and segmentation, so you want to make sure that they’re useful. And if it applies, you’re able to add multiple relationships to a single identity by clicking the add relationship button below. We can take a look at one of those examples where we have multiple relationships established. In this case, we have the person ID field, and it’s being referenced to the opportunity contact role, the program member, as well as the static list membership. Now with namespaces, schemas, and relationships all set up, you’re ready to move on to the next training module. So in summary, within this video, you’ve learned about the data structure of XDM business classes and field groups. You now have a better understanding of identity namespaces and the relationships, and how to create namespaces, schemas, and set up those relationships. Thank you for watching.